Reading music is so much easier if one can read and listen at the same time--which very few of us can when we are starting out. I give priority to the listening aspect of reading; it takes longer to achieve a synthesis but the results are more fun. What's wrong with fun!

The article on pitch in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is quite revealing: It seems that there was no such thing as standard pitch until well past the Baroque era. Voices sang where they were centered, the way I like to have my vocal tuning classes work. Introducing fixed pitch became the practice as instruments were added in to fill out the sound. Even then there were deviations from a given pitch.

It would be good, I think, instead of arguing about whether A should be 415 or 440 to postulate A's of all different frequencies. Incidentally, that's why a lot of Renaissance vocal music is available in modern editions in a wide variety of keys, some of which make no sense at all to me, like F# major. I have nothing against F# major but it is not a tonality in which people ordinarily sing, whereas F is, as is G.

Another "scientific" study was described in yesterday's paper that purported to show that people who had had some musical training responded differently to pleasing sounds than those who had not. Perhaps the study shows something altogether different: Perhaps it reveals that people are no longer singing, training or no.

Voices "true" instinctively. Responding to overtones is a natural occurrence, no training required--in fact, usually the less the better.

Pitch, like so many other things, is being mechanized to a point where it no longer is recognizable. The piano, ubiquitously (and wrongly, in my opinion)used as the arbiter of pitch, supports this tendency. Alas.

People with little or no theoretical training often have the deepest insights into musical line, provided they are given free rein and are unafraid to open their mouths and sing. What they sing -- i.e., how they tune pitches in relation to one another -- is most of the time amazingly revelatory of the inner dynamics of pitch relationships.

I learned this from reading back in the 1960's Viktor Zuckerkandl's splendid study Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World. The study, now considered dated in the light of current fashions in scientific inquiry into musical phenomena, is all about the inherent sense of tone and how it is revealed by people's response to it.

The two sight-singing groups I now lead are actually tuning classes. In each the quality of the singing is, if vocal quality is the standard, mediocre. The quality of the musical experience has been for some of the participants life-changing and it never is anything less than extraordinary in what it reveals about the inner workings of tone.

One notable exception to the observation that musicians do not like to talk about tone: An eminent cellist came to rehearse Dvorak's Dumky Trio, a work he had recorded several times and performed hundreds of times. He began the rehearsal by drawing attention to one note that never came out in tune. As we worked that moment through, right then and there, many options came to mind about how to handle it: it was a moment of collision between the cello and the piano's black keys. As soon as we took our ears out of conventional tonal thinking in which the 6th degree of the minor scale resolves on the 5th degree, everything fell into place.

Just because one tone follows another does not mean they "go" together in any conventional sense of the term.

If ever there needed to be a convincing demonstration that music and words are generated by two completely different (and often non-communicating) parts of the mind, it is in the reluctance of musicians to talk about tone. I have noticed that many of us -- yes, I include myself in this -- are unaware of what we do with tone. When caught in the act our first impulse is to deny that we did it, whatever it was.

Another sign is the lack of candor about how it feels to play with another instrument. Personalilty clashes aside, some mixes work better than others for acoustical reasons. I have noticed that two string players will take a lot of time working out the feel of intervals. Why don't these same players take comparable trouble over sounds with the piano? Is it because the sounds are so incompatible that they assume it will be a waste of time? Is it because they spend most of their playing time actively ignoring their discomfort with the sound?

I recently enjoyed conversation on this subject with two wind players, both eminent theorists, one also a composer. I wonder if they chose to become theorists to avoid such conflicts, though I have noticed that wind players tend to be more communicative on the subject of intonation and blend. That is understandable as wind players tend to be one-of-a-kind in an ensemble while strings come at least in pairs.

This morning I watched a sixteen-year-old become increasingly fascinated by the modal scales in the Clementi Exercise in B-flat from Preludes and Exercises. I was struck by my memory of boredom with scales rendered overly stable by simplistic harmonic reduction. The modal scales are nothing short of pure magic because in every transposition the black keys fall in different places, throwing them into imbalance.